Operation Rollback Water: The National Guard’s Response to the 2009 North Dakota Floods (Epilogue to B) Case Solution & Answer

In springtime 2009, North Dakota experienced some of the worst floods in state history. This case describes the way the state’s National Guard responded by mobilizing thousands of its own troops and working in concert with staff and equipment from six other states including an array of national, state, and local stakeholders. Especially, after supplying history on the North Dakota national guard as well as the state’s susceptibility to flood, the case gets how guard officials developed and practiced a strategy (“operation rollback water”) to react to the floods and the way they subsequently needed to accommodate that strategy as the crisis escalated and states transformed. In particular, the guard needed to work with a lot of national resources that arrived amid the disaster, it had to react to demands for wide-ranging and speedy support from a variety of municipalities, and it had to endure a pro-longed situation that taxed guard members in the area as well as the operations and management team that supported them. The case concludes with an epilogue that describes the way the guard used the lessons it learned from the 2009 flooding in response to a similar catastrophe in 2011.